Friday, June 22, 2012

5 Tools of the Conspiracy Theorist Trade

Conspiracy theorists often preform certain actions, or certain "tools" of their trade to help promote the conspiracy theories they believe in. These "tools" tend to be mostly annoying, usually unethical, and in some cases, even illegal.

This is a list of the five "tools" conspiracy theorists tend to use:


5. Artificiality
 Inflating Stats


Often times conspiracy theorists will constantly and repeatedly go back and forth to conspiracy theory websites, or web videos. They do this in order to artificiality inflate the stats of the site, or the video, as a both a way to help promote what ever conspiracy theories they believe, but also as a way to make people believe that these theories they promote is more accepted, or at least more popular, then they really are.

This practice is very common, and is often times even encouraged by the people who run these conspiracy theory websites, and by those that post conspiracy theory videos. In fact, Alex Jones, a radio host who owes his career to conspiracy theories, not only encourages his followers to basically artificially inflate the stats of his websites, he praises his followers for doing so.

4. Posts of Attrition
 
Often times conspiracy theorists will post long and enormous comments, or just multiple comments, in news articles, or blog posts (usually debunking blogs) that might indirectly, or directly related to what ever conspiracy theory they promote and/or believe in. Sometimes these comments are even longer then the articles or blog posts themselves, and often times it's just the same thing, just worded differently.

Sometimes these posts are nothing more then spam that's been copy and pasted multiple times on multiple sites, or just a sentence or two that's repeated over and over again in the same post, and that the actual poster never even shows up at the site again, unless they come back to re-post the exact same thing.

3. Intimidation

Intimidation is actually one of the most common tools of conspiracy theorists in order to try to scare someone into believing in the conspiracy theories they promote. Most of these actions are not direct threats, and actually make no real mention of violence, although this isn't the case sometimes, but that they insists that bad things will happen to you, and your family, if you don't start believing in their conspiracy theories.

While intimidation through fear mongering is far more common, actual harassment, and direct threats, do occur, often times against skeptics and debunkers, although sometimes just against ordinary people who express disbelief. Many times these threats are actually threats of violence, and even death threats, although usually it's just some vague statement in which the conspiracy theorist basically accuses the debunker of being a dis-info agent, and tells them that "their time will come".

Both forms of intimidation are meant for one of two purposes, if not both, and that's either scare someone into believing in the conspiracy theories they promote, or to intimidate someone in order to silencing them from speaking out against said conspiracy theories.

2. Deception

While conspiracy theorists tend to make outrageous claims, sometimes these claims are outright lies. Besides misquoting, or even posting quotes on the internet that some famous person allegedly made, but never did, many times they just make stuff up, like citing "evidence" that doesn't even exist, or saying that a conspiracy has been confirmed, when most often times it hasn't, and has even been disproved.

Often times they also make up fake stats to make it appear that more people, or that the majority of the population, or that a large amount of people in certain professions, believe in the conspiracy theories that they promote. A prime example of this would be Alex Jones claiming that 80% of the American population believes the government had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. Actually, the highest it has ever been is maybe a third of the population, and it's less then half of that now, maybe even as low as 12%.

1. Street Activism

This is actually the least commonly used tool that conspiracy theorists use.

Other then a few events that tend to attract only a handful of the most die hard conspiracy theorists, most of the time conspiracy theorists just don't bother to get off their butts and protest. They just stay home watching Youtube videos, or go about living their lives.

In fact, I live in a city with a population of over 97,000 people, I've never once seen, or even heard of, any type of any 9/11 truth, or anti-NWO protest here. The only type of street activism I've ever seen here was one of those sticky sided posters that's hard to get down, an it was stuck on the window of a store that never wanted it, or approved of it being posted there in the first place.

Despite the fact that this is considered a popular, and sometimes effective form of activism, conspiracy theorist just don't seem to employ it often, and those that do are considered to be annoying and sometimes very disrespectful by some people.

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